Posts tagged books

eBay and PayPal to Part Ways in 2015 (GigaOM)
Thanks to pressure from activist investors, eBay and PayPal will be separate entities next year, ending 12 years of togetherness.
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Stephen King Predicts That Physical Books Are Here to Stay (GalleyCat)
Author Stephen King predicts that the physical book will “be here for a long, long time.”
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Update on the Ellora's Cave vs. Dear Author Defamation Suit (The Digital Reader)
Much has changed in the three days since I brought you news that Ellora’s Cave was suing well-known romance book blog Dear Author for defamation, and few of the changes favor Ellora’s Cave.
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Four Methods for Choosing...

iPhone 6 review: The little things make it a real star (InfoWorld)
The larger design is very welcome, but there's much more to the iPhone 6 than a bigger screen.
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First Impressions: The Pocketbook 640 Ultra is a Prime Candidate for Worst eReader of 2014 (The Digital Reader)
Alas, the actual device does not come even close to meeting the expectations engendered by its price tag, nor is it capable of fulfilling all of the features listed on the product page. I’ve only had mine out of the box for a couple days now, and I deeply regret spending so much on a device...

I just finished my first full week of teaching for the new school year, and it's been so interesting to watch my students react to some of the changes I have implemented this year. In no particular order, here are some points of interest from my first teaching week.
1) God Bless the Internet
Like many teachers, I use the internet heavily---be it Google Images clipart to illustrate a worksheet or Google Translate to double-check my grammar when I am writing notes or instructions in French. Two websites my school seems to be particularly relying on this year: Reading A-z.com, a scubscription...

In today's Morning Links, I highlighted a GigaOM writeup on the latest Authors United tomfoolery: a letter to Amazon where they assert, among other things, that while Amazon does have the perfect right to refuse to stock or carry any 'commercial good' they want, they should not exercise this right on books because books are a special snowflake and not just a regular consumer good. Their letter says this:
"Amazon has every right to refuse to sell consumer goods in response to a pricing disagreement with a wholesaler. We all appreciate discounted razor blades and cheaper shoes. But books are not...

If you logged onto Facebook recently, you may have noticed some of your friends talking about 10 books that stayed with them in some way. They then tagged someone in turn – maybe you – to continue the list.
Facebook has brought all the data together from these status updates to show what books have “stayed with” Facebook users. Facebook gathered the data from the last two weeks of August.
Here are some of demographics for the people’s whose content was aggregated: The demographics of those posting were as follows: 63.7% were in the US, followed by 9.3%in India, and 6.3% in...

Whether as a solution to book stacking problems or as a last tribute to/new use for the great legacy of printed literature, book igloos are one of the most eye-catching and even useful of all monuments to the printed book. Here are some of the more eye-catching and inspiring examples from around the Web.
Kala Louise Viñas posted the example above, clearly set up for educational purposes, and even with a window for light while reading inside.
"Home" by installation artist Miler Lagos is one of the more iconic and widely shared examples, installed at New York's Magnan Metz Gallery in 2011....

I’ve finished reading through the first volume of the RPG history from that Kickstarter I mentioned the other day, and I have to say that I’m very impressed. In fact, I plan on nominating it for the “Best Related Work” Hugo when the 2014 Hugo nominations come around. It’s just that good. As I explained in the last article, this history is split across four volumes, divided by decade. However, the decade only refers to the period in which the company was founded. The approach the book takes is to trace the history of each company from...

[caption id="attachment_115803" align="alignright" width="211"] Author Mary Shelley[/caption]
Author Rejects Award Due to Amazon Backing (GoodeReader)
The ultimate in low class and poor breeding has occurred in the book world as an author turned down a major award due to its association with Amazon. UK-based children’s book author Allan Ahlberg declined the Booktrust Best Book Awards‘ Lifetime Achievement Award because the £5,000 prize money had been donated by Amazon.
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Horror and the Women Who Write It (Book Riot)
I started to delve into the online world of horror writers and horror writing forums. In my attempts to join that community, I started to realize that...

In the context of Joanna Cabot's recent post asking "Would Anyone Care About the Amazon/Hachette Dispute If it Wasn’t About Books?", it's worth picking up the editorial "Disinterested? Moi?" by Philip Jones, editor of The Bookseller, about the primacy of the book. "It is the books that should do the talking, not the publisher," he declares. "Publishers may make books, but it is the books that maketh the business."
Few actual authors would disagree with that. Jones follows with the creed he came into the job with: "my job was to support the book. We could be rude about publishers, booksellers,...

How I Failed at my Book-Buying Ban (Book Riot)
So in order to at least catch up a little bit on reading the books I already owned, I decided, at the beginning of 2013, that I wouldn’t buy books anymore...
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How J-Schools Are Tackling the Demand for Data Journalism Skills (Media Shift)
Gone are the days where journalists could boast about not being math people.
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Do Writers Need a Union? (Hugh Howey)
On the website ThePassiveVoice, commenters bring up trade and labor disputes and organizations, and I think these and class warfare comments I’ve seen elsewhere are spot-on.
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The Problem of Reinventing the Bookstore (The...

The bookplate or ex-libris, that personalized printed badge of ownership, is one of the most attractive hangovers from the great days of private libraries and book collections that sadly seems to be dying a slow death with the advent of mass publishing and ebooks - albeit enjoying an afterlife as highly prized collectibles. Paul Biba ran a short TeleRead article four years ago on the "Death of the bookplate." However, it now appears that news of its demise may have been exaggerated.
A whole new realm of digital bookplates is arising, particularly in the context of academic and other libraries that...

For all the moaners who complain that ebooks will never approximate the smell of the real thing, here's some solid proof for you - and a setback for the makers of book perfume. Because, as the site Compound Interest explains in its infographic, the scent of books is a very complex and multi-layered thing ...
The accompanying article is full of deep and detailed information on the chemistry of book smells. Dive in, and just speculate along the way on how hard the accessory designers who developed odorific peripherals for iPhones might have to go to do something similar for the...